THE LAST TIME DIANE FOLEY SPOKE to her son James was in November 2012, when he called her at work in New Hampshire. Foley, a nurse practitioner at the clinic where her husband, John, was a doctor, was relieved to hear her son’s voice. A few months earlier, Jim, as he was known, had left the US for Syria to work as a freelance videographer. That decision, coming less than a year after he had been kidnapped and detained for six weeks while reporting in Libya, horrified his family. Now, the 39-year-old was in an even more dangerous war zone. Foley couldn’t really talk, she told her son; the clinic was busy. “That’s OK, Mom,” said Jim, cheerfully, and promised to call her at Thanksgiving. A few weeks later, he was kidnapped by Islamic State (IS). Eighteen months after that, he was beheaded by a masked terrorist, the video uploaded to social media and viewed with horror all around the world. As Diane Foley says of the brief exchange she had that day with her gentle, goofy, eldest son: “I never heard his voice again.”
It is almost 10 years since the death of James Foley and, at 75, his mother isn’t remotely done talking about it. We are in New York, at a restaurant downtown, where Diane Foley presents as a slight and glamorous figure, dark-haired and all in black but for a silver cross around her neck. She has written a book with the novelist Colum McCann, called American Mother, in which she recounts the story of her son’s kidnapping and murder, and her relentless campaign, in its wake, to improve the chances of Americans wrong-fully detained abroad – including, as we speak, American dual nationals being held in Gaza by Hamas.
The emphasis of the book’s title is deliberate. While Jim was in captivity, Foley ran around Washington being passed between the US Department of State, the White House and the FBI, all of which gave her the impression that, as the grieving mother, she was a person of little consequence – practically an irritant. “I was treated terribly; lied to, patronised. I was threatened. I mean, it really was bad,” she says in a voice that, considering what she has achieved and withstood – including her remarkable decision to sit down with one of her son’s killers, face to face – I would call deceptively soft. It is thanks to Foley’s work and that of the foundation she set up in Jim’s name that American hostages taken today have a much better chance of being released than her
